How can we better serve you with this community?

The Cloudera Community has been helping users find answers to their Hadoop questions for over three years now. Over that time the community, along with the Hadoop ecosystem, has grown and changed in many ways. As a result, we are assessing the current and future state of this community to ensure that we are offering an environment that best meets the needs of our users. This is where we need your help. We are opening this thread to collect your feedback on what you like, what can be improved and any new features you would like on the community.

Some potential areas we would like feedback on are:

Segmentation of the forums - Currently the boards are mostly based on components and their function. This makes it difficult to know where to post your new question and can also reduce the number of people who see your topic.

Discussion style: is the current discussion thread style working for you? Are there examples of other communities with a more intuitive style?

Your total community hub: we are considering a large revamp of how you interact with us and find content and connections that you need. Instead of just being discussion boards, would you like a single portal for all your community needs? Including local meetup and conference registration, documentation, rich media tutorials, blogs, contests and fun rewards like quests, points, and badges that can earn you not only reputation but other real-world benefits?

Are there other ways we can make it easier and more fun to interact with Cloudera, our content, and your peers?

Improvements to current features - What features do we have that you would like to improve? A few examples:

Improved site search

Advanced user profile linked to your social media and allowing you to add and connect with others based on skills/interests

Re: How can we better serve you with this community?

I think some kind of encouragement in the use of tags would benefit overall. I honestly, always skip over the topics and head to the list of most recent questions. Down playing the topics and increasing the visibility of tags would help increase tag usage. I view them as more valuable as then the number of topics could increase without having a huge table of topics. It would be more straightforward in post and in finding specific posts. I don't want to say, just be like StackOverflow (even though it is a really awesome community site), but their use of tags is more to what I am thinking.